The problem with Anora is that it has left the door wide open for a genre of film in which the dilemma is worthwhile, but the protagonist sucks. I listened to Anora whine and scream for two-and-a-half hours. At the end of Anora, I really just wanted to leave the theater. I had seen enough. I had had enough of her on-screen extended tantrum.
I liked Anora more than Marty Mauser.
The titular Marty Supreme (Timothée Chalamet) may not be the worst screen hero of 2025, but I challenge anybody who isn’t me to find one worse. He’s selfish, narcissistic, and arrogant. For starters. He’s a womanizer, a cheat, a user, a duplicitous douche, and a sore loser. He thinks exactly as far ahead as his next ping pong serve. I suppose it’s fitting that he’s a ping pong champ. The sport requires less of him than any person in his life. But, don’t worry, he’ll let ping pong down someday, too. It stands to reason as he’s disappointed everyone and everything else.
It is 1952 Manhattan, and Marty is the #1 American ping pong player. He might be #1 in the world, except that ping pong has yet to see most of Asia. The British Open is weeks ahead. Marty aims to use such to claim a #1 world ranking but doesn’t have any money for airfare.
Ping pong -sorry, “table tennis”- is not a lucrative sport. “Don’t worry, it WILL be,” Marty insists. This is, of course, a time when a weaselly stick figure unable to wrestle your grandmother to submission could appear on a Wheaties box … but, of course, Marty hasn’t even gotten that far yet. He works in his uncle’s shoe store for the money, and then literally robs the place when his uncle stiffs him. I think we are supposed to be sympathetic to Marty at this point, but I found him annoyingly self-righteous … and he is really robbing the place like that won’t ever come up again. He’s also uses this shoestore freedom to impregnate a married woman. He will ignore her for eight months, and then deny the kid is his. In London, he makes a show of humiliating lesser players and then complains that his accommodations are bad.
It is at this point that Marty makes an effort to seduce an older retired actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), who apparently has a taste for ping pong balls. And it is at this point that I’d had enough. It is clear to me that Marty is a Supreme asshole. Oh, Marty wasn’t done being a dick, not by a long shot. Go ahead and see the film yourself if you don’t believe me, but about the time that he whined “FOUL!” about getting his ass handed to him in the British Open final, I 
was done trying to find his shtick appealing. I have absolutely no idea how anybody puts up with this clown.
Now, the fact that I loathed the hero didn’t necessarily make the film unwatchable. Writer/director Josh Safdie did a good job of presenting situations that would capture our attention even if the hero did not. The problem here is that I kept rooting for Marty not to escape whatever hole he’d dug for himself. Maybe then he would learn a lesson about love or friendship or work ethic or just being a decent human being. There’s a table tennis match at the end of this film. In the context of who Marty is, the match is important. In the context of table tennis, it merits little more than a well-attended exhibition. I rooted heavily for the prima donna to get his ass handed to him again. That is how much this jerk pissed me off.
Every year, there’s a film that soars above others in the overrated file. It often comes out in December; it often begs for awards; it often has a tie to NYC; it often gets critical approval long before it is presented to the public. Marty Supreme is that film for 2025 — Overrated film of the year. Give this film no awards. It deserves none.
There once was a ponger named Marty
Whose egocentrism was straight off the chart-y
When presented with life
And a chance to quell strife
He took his racket and had a Tokyo party
Rated R, 149 Minutes
Director: Josh Safdie
Writer: Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Genre: Rodentia
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Critics, people who NEED for December films to be important even when they are clearly not
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Me
